In just a few weeks, local high schools will graduate thousands of students. Some will become doctors, some lawyers, some insurance company workers.
Almost none of them will be going into manufacturing jobs.
Each year, the handful of technical high schools in the area – A. I. Prince Technical High School in Hartford, Howell Cheney Technical in Manchester, E.C. Goodwin Technical in New Britain, and Bristol Tech — graduate roughly 35 to 40 students, in total, from manufacturing programs. That leaves a miniscule pipeline of potential workers, and a host of very concerned potential employers.
That’s why Connecticut’s manufacturers want to talk.
A coalition of business groups will soon start a more aggressive effort to market manufacturing jobs to high school and even middle school students as part of a plan to lure more workers into that people-starved trade.
That coalition, which includes the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, Capital Workforce Partners and the state Department of Labor, among others, plans to target teachers, guidance counselors and parents in an effort to raise the profile of manufacturing as a viable career for graduating students.
Pilot Program
A pilot program is being put together for the Bristol and New Britain areas, which are rife with spring companies and other manufacturers, and where the local chambers of commerce first broached the issue of worker recruitment.
“We want to market this as a unified voice of stakeholders,” said Thomas Phillips, CEO of Capital Workforce Partners. Phillips said the goal is to counteract the notion that manufacturing is an industry in decline — one increasingly outsourced to other countries and full of dead-end, low paying jobs.
“There is a lot of misunderstanding of what a manufacturer is today,” said John Leone, president of the Greater Bristol Chamber of Commerce. “It’s a more technically skilled job now than it’s ever been, and workers are paid well for it.”
Rich Larkin, a consultant who works with manufacturers across the state, said that although manufacturing is considered a blue collar job, the pay scales are anything but blue collar. Apprenticed toolmakers—those with several years’ experience—can earn $15 to $20 an hour, and senior toolmakers can make upwards of $100,000 per year. The devices that manufacturing workers operate are highly complicated, technically advanced machines and require a high level of skill and training to use, he said.
Although employment projections by the state’s Department of Labor show a shrinking workforce for manufacturing jobs, employers in Connecticut face a tough task hiring for skilled manufacturing positions, industry experts said. And with an inevitable exodus of older workers coming, they are trying now to bolster the ranks of manufacturing workers by decade’s end.
Exactly how they will promote the industry to those would-be widget makers is still being worked out, said Lauren Kaufman of CBIA. But it will probably include marketing techniques such as career expos, informational DVDs, organized visits to manufacturing businesses, direct mail and radio advertising.
